


Clean

by peripety



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 06:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4049851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peripety/pseuds/peripety
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who knew an angel's kiss had the power to destroy such beautiful wickedness?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clean

**Author's Note:**

> Setting: After the events of “Goodbye Stranger” Season 8, episode 17, to around/about Season 10, episode 18

_Meg: What was that?_  
_Cas: I learned that from the pizza man._  
_Meg: Well, ‘A’ plus for you. I feel so...clean._

***

Rain fell soft and cold on her skin.

Meg’s first thought, oddly calm, was that it was strange how she could feel just how chill the drops were where they pattered against the heated bruises on her face.

Odd, since she was dead. Since Crowley had killed her.

Odd, since she was so calm about it.

From a distance, a siren dopplered its way into her ears until it pierced the rain-dulled silence almost painfully. And then there were voices and the odd beeps from some sort of emergency radio. She heard someone say _”Dead”_ and _”Dead”_ again, and thought, _Duh, do you really expect to find anyone in this place alive?_

“Jesus,” the paramedic muttered as if startled when he pressed fingers against Meg’s throat searching for a pulse. “Alive!” the man shouted, calling out to his partner. And instantly the EMT who shouted went into action exactly as he was trained to do. “Got a pulse here!” he yelled. Meg was as startled to find this out as he was. Huh.

Likewise, the second EMT couldn’t seem to believe any of the cold bodies had a scrap of life left. Nonetheless, she rushed over and frantically joined in the process of saving the not-quite-dead woman’s life. “God, I can’t believe she’s alive!” she muttered.

And before darkness took her, Meg doubted that God had anything to do with it.

***

In another lifetime, in what seemed like another world, she’d had another name. But when the tubes were snaked from her throat and her vocal chords were strong enough for a voice to return, that was the name she whispered to them: Meg.

Though dazed, barely alive, she remembered everything, including Crowley sliding the cold fire of the angel blade deep into the meatsuit she wore, killing the demon inside. And yet, somehow, she, Meg, was alive and united with her human vessel. This puzzle occupied her thoughts as she drifted in the ether between living and dying for days and days. And, thanks to the comforting cradle of morphine, Meg had plenty of time to consider the how and the why of this.

 _Had her unicorn saved her after all?_ Her recollection was that Castiel had been long gone by the time the Winchesters abandoned her for dead in Crowley’s murderous grip. She was sure Cas hadn’t intervened to keep Crowley from finishing her off.

So, who, or what, had saved her?

It took Meg time to sort out the pieces and make them fit together into the only pattern that made a hint of sense to her. Crowley _had_ succeeded in doing what he intended: he had killed the demon. The demon Meg. And so, without being present and certainly without intending it, the beautiful, raspy-voiced angel _had_ been the one who saved what was encased within the demon shell. Because Meg hadn’t been _only_ a demon when Crowley’s blade slid in, and hadn’t been for a long, long time. Not since an angel kissed her, cleaned her. _Who knew an angel’s kiss had the kind of power to destroy such beautiful wickedness?_ she wondered, amused, drifting on the lovely cloud of pain-killers.

She was annoyed about it, at first.

Who wouldn’t be upset at finding herself human after a couple of centuries of powerful demonic existence? This human meatsuit of a Meg was subject to hurt and to slow healing, to the indignity of bedpans and to interminable questions about how and why and what. From the start Meg found it easier to play the traumatized victim rather than try and explain Lucifer’s crypt, angel tablets, and unicorn kisses to humans who wouldn’t believe her story, anyway. She made a mental note for herself: _Stop calling them ‘humans’, baby; you’re one yourself, now._

Eventually, the cops sorted out who she was or, at least, to whom the human body had once belonged: the failed actress from Cheboygan, Michigan, last known to be a comatose victim of a beating and stabbing that occurred years ago in West Hollywood. How a mostly brain-dead coma patient from L.A. had come to again be a victim of violence half the country away was beyond the cop’s ability to explain, especially as Meg continued giving the actress’ finest performance. Meg was surprised by the amount of sympathy that her performance elicited, so much so that when she was wheeled out to stand and face the cold, harsh world there was a small buffer of cash in her pocket, collected by cops and hospital staffers, enough to secure a roof over her head until she sorted out the path of this new, unexpectedly human life.

***

Even under the glare of the harsh fluorescent light over the motel sink Meg was pleased with the results of her initial transformation, the last remnants of the blond hair that Crowley had forced on her dyed back to black, cut short enough to eliminate the worst of the damaged ends. She turned her head this way and that, running fingers through the damp strands, thinking. Her life, too, needed some transformation.

“No Winchesters,” Meg told her reflection as the first rule of this new life. This one was a no-brainer, a vow easily made and she was sure it would be easily kept, too. The lummox Moose and his permanently pissed brother needed avoiding at all costs. They’d gotten her killed plenty enough times already, thank you very much. She slid her fingertips along the still-pink scar left by the blade Crowley had sliced her with. Luckily for her, he had piss-poor aim.

“No unicorns.” Her smile was rather sad about this rule. But she was human, now, and even if Castiel had never intended to become an actual guardian angel named Clarence, he had saved her life and the least she could do would be to keep that life safe. Boring as that sounded. “Maybe a little boredom won’t be so bad,” she told her reflection, not believing it for a minute.

“No prayers.” Rule number three was easy, too. She had no use for douchebag angels (except her own, see Rule #2) and her fathers Lucifer and Azazel were dead or trapped and she was tired of being their last warrior standing. Crowley had won Hell in all ways that counted. Besides, she wasn’t a demon anymore.

Did she have a soul? Meg wondered about this. She would have to risk doing a spell to find out, but only once she warded her body from demonic possession and from angel tracking, too. The tattoo shop would be her next stop. She should have found one straight after leaving the hospital rather than risk one of Crowley’s minions discovering her, but her luck held through til morning, although it took three stops before she found a technician with enough artistic flair and attention to detail to allow him to ink the warding symbols onto her skin.

Once all the wardings that she could think of were etched in place, Meg cautiously gathered the supplies needed to perform a spell. She had been a witch back in her human days; in fact, that avocation had damned her to hell in the first place. She no longer possessed a grimoire, but she hardly needed one with the internet at her fingertips. Cyberspace proved more useful than the local coven she’d nosed around to find. Thirteen wannabes more interested in cookie recipes than concocting recipes for disaster. They had been chock full of new-age-y circle of life bullshit.

Oh, the good old days. She missed them.

“Well, fuck me.” Meg sat back on her heels in the middle of her spell circle, staring at the silver scrying bowl set before her knees, the reading unmistakable: she had a soul. She was a living, breathing, complete human. She would live. She would die. She would see Crowley again, more than likely, at the end of her days. Even Castiel wasn’t good enough to pull off a second miracle and save the shambles of her soul from that fate.

But with any luck it would be years and years before she had to deal with the reckoning. And in the meantime she had the fun of imagining the look on Crowley’s face when she one day barged through Hell’s gates and announced herself.

Good times ahead.

***

Thanks to a couple of perilous but incredibly lucrative deals involving artifacts Meg pilfered unashamedly from Lucifer’s vaults, the newly-human ex-demon retired to Florida like any well-heeled senior citizen ought. It amused her to think of herself as the only tri-centenarian among her fellow aged snow-belt refugees even if she didn’t quite look the part, with no need for blue rinses or custom orthotics quite yet.

While gaining a human soul had lost her the ability to see a demon’s true face, Meg seemed to have retained enough of a sixth sense to easily avoid a whiff of the supernatural. Oh, she heard the rumors: the angels falling to earth, dead souls trapped in the veil...in other words, same day, different apocalypse; and wondered if her Clarence was still fighting, still trying to save the humanity he loved and his fellow angels from themselves. But as she had no desire to jump back into the fray to find out, Meg instead learned to play cutthroat bridge with her fellow retirees and rather too gleefully relieved them of their dollars and cents.

When she was fully recovered from her injuries, and when sipping mojitos, fleecing senior citizens, and catching up on the latest fiction bored, it was time for Meg to move on.

***

_I’ve figured one thing out about this world – just one, pretty much. You find a cause, and you serve it. Give yourself over, and it orders your life. Lucifer and Yellow Eyes – their mission was it for me…Obviously, these things shift over time. We learn, we grow._

 

The only thing as strange as looking up and seeing a unicorn on a pristine Caribbean beach was seeing an angel.

In a trenchcoat.

“Oh. My. God.”

Did she have sunstroke? Had months of sun and sand fried her human brain? But as Meg walked up the beach toward the apparition it did not disappear but merely came into sharper focus until they were face to face. Nose to nose.

And she punched him, hard, in the gut. He didn’t even flinch, damn him.

“How the hell did you find me?” Meg snarled, immediately followed by, “And what the hell took you so long?” Then, it was either punch him again or --

So she grabbed him and kissed him, his cool angel lips against her human sun-heated ones, and while both angels and demons would have howled in outrage to see them thus, in Meg’s ears was only the sound of the waves on the beach and a singing so sweet she would have cried if she was inclined to be sappy and ridiculous. Which she wasn’t.

“Well?” she demanded of Castiel, as if impatient with the delay for an answer to her questions, never mind that her lips had been satisfyingly locked with his for the past several minutes. “Explain yourself, sunshine.”

“Explain how I found you?” Castiel replied, circling to her initial question but looking like he had to concentrate hard to form his usual pedantic replies. Meg thought he looked kind of good all dazed and confused. His eyes, blue as the ocean washing the beach near their feet, were skipping over her, from head to heels, as if to puzzle out why he was seeing a human face not overlaid by the ghost of her inner demon, or so Meg guessed. “I went back to the hospital where they’d taken you after...Crowley...I wanted to know if you’d received a proper burial…” He frowned. “Sam swore he saw Crowley kill you, only at the hospital I found out you were alive when they brought you in...how, Meg?” He looked mystified, eyes seeing but not believing as they once more did a slow inventory over her.

But Meg didn’t buy his confusion. “You should know. You’re the reason I survived in spite of damn Crowley,” Meg insisted, making a face at having to say the name of the King of Hell.

“Meg, I…” Cas was shaking his head. “I was miles away, protecting the angel tablet when Crowley killed you.” Did he wish he _had_ been there to save her? Was that why Meg imagined she saw regret in eyes as blue as the heaven that had made him?

“Crowley killed the _demon,”_ Meg clarified with a satisfied tilt of her lips. Even after two years she was still smug enough to celebrate her outwitting of the red-eyed demon who’d usurped hell’s throne. “But you made me more than just a demon long before that, Clarence.” She couldn’t help smirking as she called him that because now the name was actually apropos, as she was convinced that Cas was her own guardian angel.

Since Cas still looked confused, Meg went on with her take of what happened to transform her from demon back to human. “Because someone in this universe is an ironic bitch, and since Crowley kept my meatsuit in such fine repair so he could continue to torture it – me – this body survived...and so did the human part of my soul left inside the demon. There wasn’t much left, but...I’m human, Cas. Damn you.” But her eyes were bright with laughter and the grin she’d been holding in at last split her lips apart.

Castiel laid his hand over her heart, fingers cool on her skin above the bikini top. “Human,” he confirmed, though his eyes still looked doubtful about Meg’s explanation. His eyes took in the warding symbols inked on her skin. “I can do better --”

Meg nearly passed out and would have crumpled to the sand if Castiel hadn't caught her before she fell; burning, burning, pain flaming all the way to her bones. “You still know how to show a girl a good time, Cas,” she gasped, holding onto him until the pain eased enough that her legs could hold her again. “What the hell was that?”

“Angel warding. Demon barriers, carved into your bones,” he explained, looking satisfied. His hands lingered on the bare skin of her waist, distracting Meg, making it hard to concentrate and follow Cas' words. “Neither side can find you now.”

“Thanks. I think.” Using his forearms as leverage, Meg pulled herself upright just as two tourists passed them on the sand, sending Castiel the strangest look. Meg stared back, raised an ironic eyebrow.

“What, you’ve never seen a man in a trenchcoat before?” she asked them and they hastily moved away in case they were dealing with lunatics. Which, obviously, she and Cas looked like. Meg took his arm and began leading the way up the beach toward her cottage. “Come on. You’ve got some more ‘splainin’ to do, Lucy. Let’s get to it,”

“Lucy…” Castiel said, falling into step beside her, the sensible wingtips on his feet barely marking the sun-hot sand as they walked. “You are referring to Lucy and Ricky Ricardo from _I love Lucy,”_ Cas said thoughtfully as he clarified the reference for himself and Meg nearly toppled to the sand once again, shocked that he’d know. “I assure you, no such hijinks were needed to find you, Meg, even though you were very effective in disguising your trail.”

“My, my, a lot has changed since I’ve seen you, if you suddenly understand pop culture references. Add it to the list, Cas.”

The list was long.

It lasted through Meg’s shower and change into clean shorts and halter top, followed by a much needed shot of scotch or three. Castiel did not join her for the former but indulged in the latter without visible effect. Meg envied his angelic constitution. Cas' story went on through a meal of grilled fish and rice, lasting until the sun began to think about making a slow descent toward the sea.

And Metatron’s instilling Cas with a catalog of pop culture was only a minor footnote in a tale that included angels falling to the earth, an angel-bitch named Naomi, Cas losing and finding his grace, and Dean Winchester taking on the Mark of Cain. Meg positively cackled to imagine Crowley ruling hell under mama Rowena’s thumb. Cas insisted on pausing his narrative so that Meg could explain her amusement over Rowena, listening carefully as Meg described a dalliance of her own with the dark magics of witchery harnessed by Rowena’s former coven. And all the while he talked her eyes flowed over him, taking in the familiar untamed muss of his dark hair, the warm tones of his skin, and those eyes blue as the heaven she was sure she would never see.

Then came her turn to lay out her story for Castiel, from Crowley to her awakening in the hospital, to all the stops along the way to this Caribbean paradise. She grinned, unrepentant, as she described looting Lucifer's vault, pretending to pout when Cas went all censorious, wanting to know exactly what artifacts she'd sold and to whom.

“You sold an angel sword? To a shape-shifter?” Castiel's voice rose to an accusatory finish but Meg only made a face at his narrow-eyed disapproval.

“Oh, don't give me that angelic look of moral outrage,” Meg dismissed with an airy wave of her hand. As far as she was concerned, angels had no room to judge anyone, even ex-demons. “He was quite civilized. For a shifter. And beside, it's not like I'm not still damned to hell, no matter what I do,” Meg said bluntly as she finished her survival tale in full detail as Cas insisted.

Somehow, over the course of the afternoon, Meg had persuaded Cas to shed that damn coat, tie, and suit jacket, and her legs were comfortably settled across his lap as they shared a cushioned love seat on her lanai. Watching him frown, she wished she'd freed more than just the top two shirt buttons she'd undone, enjoying looking at him, and never more than when he got all stiff and superior with disapproval. She really did find a perverse pleasure when he looked at her like that. “Cas, this island is as close to paradise as I'm ever likely to see.” She waved her glass of scotch to airily encompass her current life. “This life is just a temporary reprieve. My sins are too great to save me from a return trip to the pit and you and I both know it.”

Castiel stared at her, eyes searching, as if struggling to find the loophole that might save her shredded soul from the fate she outlined for him with such calm. Meg found it as whimsical as it was endearing, and so very Castiel-like. “Crowley can’t have you again,” Cas finally came up with, sounding and looking almost mulish, and Meg’s smile was tinged with whimsy of her own, feeling a stab in her gut that he would want to challenge fate. For her.

“Why, Castiel, I do believe you care,” She was nothing like the sweet southern belle she sounded like and she knew the angel knew it, too. Still, it was sweet for her to hear and made her tingle in certain places. She ran her toes along Cas’ inner thigh, feeling muscles shift as her toes slid higher and higher, full of tease and suggestion. She whispered, “Pizza man”, their own code word of lust and desire and leaned in close, lips parted, going for a kiss – a real one this time, not one born of surprise or despair. For an angel, he had a mouth that was sinfully sweet and she badly wanted to taste it again.

Meg could have thrown the damn thing when her phone suddenly chimed. She settled for a bitten-off curse. But, guessing who was calling and why, she grabbed for it. “Hold that thought,” she told Cas before answering.

“Is it happening?” she said as an answer to the caller, her face turning from sultry to delighted, until she was outright grinning. A terse word or two, and she tossed the phone away, alive and energized. “Do you want to see?” she was almost whispering, sitting up, alight with excitement. “It’s happening. Come and see.”

“What? Meg?” Castiel asked, confused when her imminent seduction was superseded by a sudden burst of excitement and energy. But Meg was already off the loveseat, hurriedly slipping on a pair of flip-flops, snatching up two high-powered flashlights. Meg grabbed Cas’ hand and pulled him from the veranda, down the beach, practically running along the sand, angel in tow. For a change they weren't charging headlong into danger but into a different kind of battle.

“It’s going to be amazing, you’ll see,” Meg said breathlessly when at last she slowed in a sheltered cove. Here they met others armed with similar flashlights ready for use as twilight loomed, turning the sea to gray and green. The air was tense and excited among those gathered. After exchanging a few words with one of the figures Meg tugged Cas to a spot further up the beach, hand still warm in his. “Watch, just watch,” she whispered to him, watching the sand, holding her breath.

Just a few feet away, the sand began to shift, stirred by something underneath its porous crust. And moments later a head appeared as the first tiny creature clawed and fought its way out of the deep nest. “It’s called a boil,” she said; and indeed that was what the area of sand appeared to be doing as more and more tiny turtles fought out of their eggs and clambered up to surface, flippering quickly and awkwardly but with unerring instincts down to the beckoning sea. “We’ve got to watch out for birds and for lizards. They’ll try and grab them and eat them--” Meg said and, leaving a fascinated Castiel to guard the nest, she began vigilantly shepherding her tiny charges down to the safety of the water, warding off forays by would-be predators looking for a free and easy meal.

Back and forth, Castiel and Meg worked to safeguard the turtle's passage into the water. The grins Castiel shared with her made Meg's breath catch, reminding her, keenly, of the half-mad angel obsessed with bees who'd managed to shift her unlikely affection into something even more madly improbable.

As darkness fell, flashlights clicked on up and down the beach. More than a dozen people protected the hatchlings; islanders and tourists alike part of the miraculous process, not to mention an angel and a former demon. And by the time the last of the hatchlings disappeared into the dark sea Meg and Cas were wet and covered with sand. Meg was breathless with the wonder of the experience, catching Castiel’s hand up in hers and tugging him away into the dark.

“So. This is your new cause,” Castiel observed as they walked back up the beach to Meg’s cottage, not bothering with flashlights but letting light from the cloud-scudded moon illuminate their way. Her steps didn't hurry, letting the shifting sand under her feet sway her against him, brushing arm and hip and thigh, each touch brief and yet deeply pleasurable.

Meg sent him a sly grin through the dark. “It’s not nearly as fun as slicing and dicing demons or running with a pack of hungry hell hounds, but a girl has to do what a girl has to do,” she said as if she somehow regretted the loss of her demon existence. And, okay, maybe she missed some parts of it sometimes. But there was a sweetness to this human life she never expected to find. Like being a part of new life emerging with grit and determination. Like catching up an angel’s hand and holding it in her own, fingers locked and secure. Like feeling her heart beat slow and heavy as she grew warm with want and anticipation.

Meg led Cas straight to the shower, turning it on before shedding her clothes, quick, efficient, her eyes locked with his the whole time she stripped herself down to sandy skin. Some sort of angel process could have probably cleaned Cas up with a snap of the fingers, but it was much more interesting and fun for Meg to flick open the buttons of his white shirt and peel it off his shoulders, finding them broad, nicely muscled, tracing the line down his arms and tugging the shirt away. She put her mouth to his chest, laving a nipple, biting with enough sting to make it stand up hard against the press of her tongue. Cas’ hands came up to close around her hips, drifting up to follow the curves of her waist, her torso, cupping her breasts. She put her hands over his and held them there, tilting her face up for his kiss.

Their lips joined, cool and hot. She might be presently human but she felt dark, so dark. Corruptible and corrupting and all things wicked, wickeder than heaven or even hell. Her hands worked at his belt, the zip of his fly, pushing off the trousers, down his legs, bending, putting a hand behind one knee and then the other so she could raise each leg and pull the final barrier to his skin away. And when she straightened, Meg grazed her body up Castiel’s, flesh on flesh, soft and satisfyingly hard exactly where she wanted him to be. Meg shoved him under the spray with the hard slap of her hands on his chest and followed him in, pulling his head down and kissing him, open mouth, tongue seeking, while her hand found and cradled him.

“Tell me you want me,” Meg asked huskily, as if not yet trusting the evidence of Cas aroused against her palm. “Please. Say it. Just once.” If she would have dared to challenge honesty, Meg would have acknowledged she still had a heart even after centuries of heartlessness. And at this moment it was a heart needing to believe in rainbows and unicorns.

Castiel’s hands came up and he rested his palms on either side of her head, smoothing the dark wet strands away as he tilted up her face with thumbs under her chin, a moment of unexpected gentleness. “I want you.” He added another word, one that startled her enough that she jerked in his grasp though his body held her taut and against him. It had been so very long since anyone had spoken her true name. Centuries, in fact. But he spoke it now, to her, and to Meg it sounded like a secret he had been holding onto in some deep part of his angel’s heart.

Then Cas pushed her hard, back against the tiles – as hard as she'd shoved him – hoisting her up and off her feet. Off-balance, Meg had to grabbed at his shoulders slick with water, broad and sleek under the grip of her hands. He put his lips against her smile and everything ceased to matter but their mouths and the tangle of their tongues and then their limbs and then the merge of their bodies.

Like Meg, Cas moved with deliberate purpose, as if as driven as she to touch and tease everywhere in this battle of nerves and need. Shower sex was bound to be a slippery, tricky affair, but with an angel who seemed able to effortlessly kept them solid and rooted to the earth Meg never doubted he'd keep them upright. It satisfied Meg enormously when Castiel moved with as much impatience as she did, almost as much as it satisfied when he was at last inside her. She cried out and arched and wrapped her legs around his waist and took him just as he took her.

Time, Meg was sure, actually stopped as the water ran cool over the fire of her skin. She gasped and moaned as flesh slapped against flesh, so good it hurt. Was there the tang of salt mixed in with water? Meg would have denied they were tears; just as she would have denied half-believing some crazy old deity had always meant an angel and a demon for one another as if to satisfy some sort of mad cosmic taste for whimsy.

None of that mattered, anyway, not with Cas inside her, neither of them giving nor asking for nor needing finesse. There was no holding back, not at long last. All too soon Meg cried out as she came, her body rippling around Castiel’s, holding on tight. It was Castiel’s name she shouted, the only prayer she ever had or ever would need. And she clung to Cas as she felt him follow into the wave of heat and bliss, as if shattered as she. With arms and legs still wrapped around him, Meg pressed her mouth to his jaw, the dark stubble raking across her lips as she trailed the kiss over his skin until she found his mouth, soft and cooling against the abraded skin. 

Afterwards, Cas used his strength when Meg had none left, making sure they made it to the bed, falling across it, and they clung with something more approaching gentleness. And Meg (willing to thank God for an angel’s stamina as they came together again sooner than humanly possible) found, this time, an unexpected sweetness that made her breath catch and her mind blur.

They lay in the darkness entwined, without words, awake without the need for sleep.

As the dawn ghosted along the horizon Cas’ phone chimed, rousing them as if from some dark reverie. Meg joined Castiel’s hunt for the elusive intrusion. She found and tossed the cell phone to him with a familiar, exasperated half-smile, listening to his half of a terse conversation with resignation.

“Sam? Or Dean?” Meg asked when Cas ended the call.

“Sam,” Cas confirmed, looking at her through the pre-dawn shadows, blue and gold, “But it’s Dean. The mark...Sam says it’s…”

Meg waved off the unnecessary and totally boring explanation. “Go. Do what you do. Only Cas…” Before Cas could get up and find his clothes Meg grabbed him close, hooking a leg behind his thighs and not letting go. “Only, don’t take so long to find me next time, all right? I’m only human, now, remember.” She frowned. “Or human again. And I need to make my wickedness really count this time.” Her fingertips, gliding along the length of him, made her meaning unmistakable even for a sometimes slightly obtuse angel.

And Cas kissed her once more, sweet and long, before rising and dressing swiftly.“I’ll be back.”

“You know how I feel about promises, Castiel. Just remember, I’m your secret. Out of the fight for good. No tattling to the damn Winchesters and getting me killed again. I’ve got a different cause now.”

“You’re my secret,” Cas agreed. And smiled at her with his eyes. “Keep saving your turtles, Meg.”

“For as long as you keep saving the world, angel.”

Meg found herself telling this to only the morning sun as Castiel disappeared without another word or a backward glance. _Some things,_ Meg thought with a huff of laughter, _never changed._

Getting up, stretching, Meg felt lazy of limb and mind. Naked, she walked down to the beach and stretched out on the pristine white sand as the morning sun arched higher and hotter in the sky, almost white against the background blue of heaven. Its rays instantly raised prickles of heat on her skin, unsparingly hot. Like, the fires of hell hot. The comparison made Meg grin as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the burn. When, a few moments later, a shadow fell across her closed eyelids she was startled into opening them. She raised a hand to shield against the blazing, almost blinding heat and light. But there were no angel wings shielding her, merely those of a group of long-winged frigate birds streaming by overhead. Meg laughed softly to herself, closing her eyes as she settled back on the sand to sizzle in the heat for a little while longer.

She was, after all, intimately familiar with all the joys of flesh and flames.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to Bond Girl whose insightful feedback and suggestions helped bring this fic to a conclusion that kept it true to Meg's character.


End file.
